AgTalk Home
AgTalk Home
Search Forums | Classifieds (47) | Skins | Language
You are logged in as a guest. ( logon | register )

Pilots,how many do we have here?
View previous thread :: View next thread
   Forums List -> AgTalk CafeMessage format
 
illfarmr
Posted 11/6/2010 23:46 (#1424969 - in reply to #1424913)
Subject: Looonngg Story


Central Illinois		After learning everything the UofI could teach me (according to them), I enlisted in he Navy in the late 60's. Signed up to be a mechanic, best thing I thought for a future farmer. In San Diego for boot camp, the meanest, nastiest, most foul mouth Chief Petty Officer (a wave) told us that she didn't give us a rat's behind what our recruiter had promised us, that whatever the results of test we were about to take would determine what the F we would be in her navy. You could see the guys who had signed up to be nuclear technicians or medical corpsman start to tear up. So much for improving my mechanical skills.

When the results came back, it showed I was suited to be a aircraft sheet metal mechanic. Yuch, but oh well. They sent me to Millington, Tn, just north of Memphis for A School. Unfortunately, when I got there, the class was filled up. A clerk asked me if I new anything about electronics. I said heck yes, I had a great Ag Teacher who taught me a lot about electricity, so they stuck me Avionics, aviation electronics. A few weeks before graduation, they said I was in the top 10% of the class, and eligible for another class, something brand new called computers, and would I be interested? I said yes, and four months later they sent me to NAS Corpus Christi TX, where the main mission was to train 90 day wonders just out of basic flight school how to fly multi-engine props (S2F's).

The FAA allowed these "aces" to use flight simulators to accumulate one half of the flight hours needed for their multi-engine and IFR ratings. Back in those days, the flight simulators were run by vacuum tubes, diodes and resistors, and they were VERY tempermental, hence a great need for us to work on them. The actual instructors were contract civilians earning $16-18,000 per year. About the time I got their, some military genius figured out that since we were already at the computers, and were being paid the sum about $135 per month, it would be cheaper to give us a crash course and let us be instructors and let the civilians go. And that was how I became an instructor, except we didn't have a license. Almost all of us went out on our own and got private pilot licenses, and got a bunch of simulator hours on our cards, but we rarely got any actual flight time.

Still fly a little bit with one of my landlords, just not enough time anymore to be good at it.
Top of the page Bottom of the page


Jump to forum :
Search this forum
Printer friendly version
E-mail a link to this thread

(Delete cookies)